Threads and traces: paleontology

Showing posts with label paleontology. Show all posts

24 October 2010

Out standing in the field

Cottonwood reverie

There are things that you can't teach in a classroom. For me, that list is growing enormously. In paleontology, for instance, nothing takes the place of taking the class to the site, rather than struggling to bring a simulation of the site into the classroom. This is an observational science, not an experimental one. If we want our students to be leaders in the field, I would argue that we have to take them into the field in the first place, to develop their skills as observers, documenters and problem-solvers.

We did just that again last week, visiting some key sites nearby and letting the students start working on an actual annual inventory of fossil resources. Because these sites have been poached, we were able to combine the inventory learning with an impromptu lecture on why this was CSI: South Dakota and what they should be looking for in terms of illegal removal and vandalism. It was a tremendous opportunity for all of us to learn in a half-day what would take me many more hours to explain in a classroom.

We all learn best by doing, by handling and manipulating, by seeing everything in situ and interconnected rather than separated and shorn of context. At some point, abstraction has to be linked back to the reality that first gave rise to the concept.

Om top of that, it was a perfect fall prairie day. Enjoy the scenery.

Moving up the hill from the cottonwoods

The group on the ridge in slanting morning light

Main hazard on this site: solitary male bison. This one was not much of a hazard, though.

Fall colors on the hills and prairies

Subtle fall colors up close

Another bison, just as unimpressed.

26 September 2010

Nebraska Saturday

Sod house, Toadstool Geologic Park, late September

I haven't said much about my class this semester, I notice. And that is an oversight. I plead exhaustion after a non-stop summer of moving big heavy things in all directions, but that's really no excuse.

We have a class in paleontology resource management, which I floated as a trial balloon last year and is now permanent. This is a class for teaching our students about negotiating the laws, rules and regulations of the various Federal and state land management agencies that deal with fossil resources on their lands. The idea is that our students get a chance to learn about the rules for monitoring and mitigating adverse impacts on fossil resources in the course of things like highway and pipeline construction, land management agency work, and field work in general. It was, the first time, a somewhat dry course.

This year things are a lot different.

This year, we joined forces with the staff and students at Oglala Lakota College and are focusing on one issue in depth: the plans to make what is now the South Unit of Badlands National Park into its own entity, a tribal national park under the aegis of the Oglala Sioux Tribe and the National Park Service. For more information about this plan, check out the General Management Plan draft here.

It is a complex plan that restores a great deal of decision-making power for this land to the Oglala Lakota people at Pine Ridge Reservation, on which the South Unit is located. Our class--both SDSMT and OLC students--will be studying this plan in depth and writing a report on the implementation of it insofar as fossil resources are affected. For the Lakota, the historic, cultural and scientific landscapes are seamlessly one entity, and all these factors must be taken into account. We are using the plan and our response to it as a real-life, real-time text.

Yesterday, both groups of students traveled to northwest Nebraska to two key sites--Toadstool Geologic Park and the Hudson-Meng Bison Bonebed site--to learn about land management decisions in the field, not in the classroom.

I think that we are starting to learn a lot more about each other, too.